A Geek Tragedy in Three Acts (continued)

Act I: Reporting Hasn’t Been Upgraded
It’s troubling that reporting is so often overlooked by Synergy developers, particularly when one considers that the representation of company data is usually the only aspect of a software solution that is regularly seen by corporate decision-makers.

One of the most powerful and easily implemented xfServerPlus initiatives is to update a company’s reporting services. Yet it’s surprising just how many people have passed up the opportunity to activate xfServerPlus and start using the tools it offers to their advantage. Furthermore, the failure to develop reports that are visually appealing and substantially easier to create does nothing but leave the door open for outside influences to disparage the quality of current reports — usually based on nothing more than how they look or how long they might take to develop.

Now, many of us have written (and rewritten, and modified, and updated) reports in cell-based environments, and if you can show me someone who’s enjoyed it, then I can likely show you a masochist with too much time on his hands. Writing fixed-width reports just isn’t fun to do, and it’s probably why reports — once created — are so rarely revisited or updated. It’s also why requests to develop entirely new reports sometimes fall through the cracks.

The beauty of leveraging xfServerPlus with your reporting efforts is that the guts of almost every reporting program are entirely without a user interface. In fact, when you get down to it, they’re simply functions with a specific set of criteria (or parameters). Because of this, they make excellent additions to any xfServerPlus Method Catalog and are startlingly easy to create.

Once the procedure has been “xf-enabled,” it’s practically a joy to build the front-end of the application. Not only do whole new vistas of opportunity appear when you allow a user to input the report criteria with a GUI (with access to check boxes, radio buttons, drop-down lists, and the like), but the output is simplicity itself to create.

As anyone who’s ever been asked to “insert a column here” or “expand that value there” knows, working with fixed-width reports can be a regular pain in the assembly. But with a .NET interface, for instance, showing a new column or expanding a particular value can be as easy as checking a box. Exporting the report — whether it be to Excel, a PDF, or some other format — is usually just a question of dropping in the correct control.

Suddenly, what used to take hours of mind-numbing work can be distilled into a few short minutes of effort.

Act II: Development Has Become Reactive, Rather than Proactive
There seems to be some disconnect between many Synergy developers and their user base. As users have become more technologically savvy, the onus is on the developer to make applications that are more intuitive and more familiar. Yet many Synergy applications — and particularly those developed “in house” to fill a specific company’s requirements — are allowed to stagnate. New features are only rarely introduced (if at all), and old application protocols aren’t revisited to see if they can be enhanced or streamlined.

It’s likely that users in organizations such as these have come to many erroneous conclusions: The software is antiquated, it can’t be updated, it can’t do what we need, etc. And while the Synergy developer can defend the quality of the application because he knows the complexities that occur “under the hood,” it’s never going to convince a user whose perception has been skewed. Take reporting again: If a user feels that the only way to get the data she needs is to create several reports on your Unix/OpenVMS system, manually transfer the results over the network to her Windows client, and then painstakingly remove column headers before finally dropping everything into an Excel worksheet… well, any argument that the system is “just fine” is going to fall on deaf ears.

Once the perception has been established, it’s nearly impossible to get rid of – unless the users feel as if they’re using a new application. That’s where xfServerPlus can play such a pivotal role.

xfServerPlus offers the ability to launch your application to practically any GUI, whether it be a Windows desktop, a Web site, a mobile phone, or a touch-screen Point of Sale system. You’ll also find that once you’ve built up a core set of routines in the Synergy Method Catalog, many new features and enhancements will become “no-brainers” to incorporate. Couple it with access to .NET Framework assemblies or JavaBeans that have already been developed (Google is your friend!), and you’ve got a “new” application that is second-to-none in features and reliability.

Suddenly, users are logging in to your application through a Windows GUI, and they’re seeing screens that are similar to the ones they’ve always used with your software. But now they can use a mouse and have access to drop-downs, and check boxes, and graphs, and COLOR. Lots of color.

Chances are, they won’t realize it’s the same base application that they’re using, and they wouldn’t care if they did. xfServerPlus can inexpensively and quickly bring the familiarity of a Windows-based GUI to your user base, providing a means for easier enhancement in the future. Once the user base is satisfied (and it usually doesn’t take much), you’ll find that it’s harder for management to even consider the expense of an alternate solution; they simply can’t find any need for it!

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